Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Harry Singh, a Partner Director at Jola, cycled over 350 miles from Edinburgh back home to Birmingham, over the weekend. With other members of his cycling club, Harry helped raise over £2500 for the Sikh Helpline – a local charity that provides a Samaritans-type service in the West Midlands.

Harry Commented “I am pleased to say that we all managed to cover the distance (367 miles in total) and raise over £2.5k for the charity, and the event itself raised substantially more.  In doing so, I also burnt through 30,920 calories, so if you see me stuffing my face during any Teams calls over the next few days that’ll be why!”

Awareness and support for mental health has improved over the last few years. Organisations like Jola are inclusive and diverse. They provide all employees with private medical care and support for physical and mental conditions. Employees need to feel supported and valued within a business and channel businesses benefit from strong relationships with an experienced and successful team.

At Jola, we provide a safe environment for the neurodiverse and check in with them regularly. As a business, we provide confidential counselling and encourage holidays and social interaction with our team, such as family fun days and team nights out. 

About Jola

Jola is an award-winning, channel-only supplier of business communications specialising in mobile data SIMs. We are a global eSIM MVNO, providing innovative IoT and mobile data solutions to MSPs, ISPs, IT support companies and telecommunications resellers.

Integrations are important as they help businesses to improve performance, reduce costs and enhance customer relationships. UC improves productivity with simple click-to-call users when they are available and helps teams collaborate. Common integrations are Microsoft with Cisco and common CRM software.

Partners successful in this area are looking at how their businesses interact with customers and how this can be enhanced using unified communications. Vendors can help by identifying key use cases highlighting unique solutions to common problems.

Selling the benefits

According to Metrigy Research, companies that utilise integrated UC and CC solutions from a single vendor reported a nearly 100 per cent revenue increase, a 14 per cent cost decrease, a 57 per cent customer ratings improvement, and a 37 per cent agent efficiency improvement. 

By reducing the time spent switching between different communication platforms, UC allows employees to focus more on their tasks. With real-time sharing capabilities, employees can seamlessly connect from any location and device with an internet connection. This flexibility enables remote work, and international collaborations, and fosters a work-from-anywhere culture.

Unique, cost-effective managed solutions are the key to success for channel partners trying to win new business. End-users buy from suppliers they trust, who are responsive to their needs. Being a one-stop-shop for all of their requirements is important as is working with an aggregator.

Future

At the moment, the UC collaboration experience is all based on two dimensions video and screen sharing.  However, we already see our SIMs being used in Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications in specialist industries with purpose-built tools and devices.  However, companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google are investing heavily in AR and VR for both consumers and businesses.  This combined with the widespread availability of 5G makes me think it won’t be too far away before the UC and Collaboration tools that we use every day start to open up AR and VR for widespread B2B use.

Cultural standing  

We assess the strength of our cultural standing against our core values. These are not advertised on our company walls they are ingrained in our behaviour. We put our partners first. We track how quickly calls are answered, how fast tickets are resolved and how happy our partners are with our service. The best measure of our cultural standing is the longevity of our staff.

Cultural priorities

We are accountable. We do what we say we are going to do. This is important as our partners trust us to respond quickly so they can get back to their customers. This impacts day-to-day behaviours as we honour our commitments and if we can’t, we let people know before the deadline and renegotiate so we don’t let each other or our partners down.

Cultural focus 

Right now we are focussed on the growth plan for financial year 24/25. To achieve the high targets we have set for ourselves, we need to recruit additional resources in sales, marketing and support. We will be recruiting against our values to find innovative, ambitious individuals, who will help partners to find, win and roll out unique solutions.

Cultural competitive advantage

We offer a unique environment to learn new skills, develop careers, and build a successful company. We offer competitive packages and the opportunity to be first to market with innovative solutions. The work is rewarding and the rewards are incentivising.

Living by our values

Our culture is driven and demonstrated by the founders of our business. It’s how we behave and how our team behaves. We share our success in company meetings, reward success in our appraisals and reflect on how we can improve our success. Culture is something that is learnt. You can see it in action in a company. It’s how things are done and how you get things done. It does not require a big budget.

Adrian Sunderland, CEO of Jola, announces another senior appointment. Joseph Kirk is promoted to Chief Architect reporting directly to him.

Joseph will be responsible for software architecture, strategy, and development.  He has been with Jola for over 10 years holding several key positions, most recently as Software Development Manager.  He has driven innovation, improved systems and enhanced user experience.

Joseph commented, “I look forward to managing and developing our cloud infrastructure and software to meet partner requirements, now and in the future."

Adrian Sunderland, Jola’s CEO, commented “Both Robustel and ZoHo have recognised Joseph for driving innovation. I have worked with him for many years. I am confident in his ability to deliver unique solutions, which are easy to manage, save customers money and generate healthy recurring margins for our partners.” 

Adrian Sunderland, Jola’s CEO, took part in a 100-mile charity bike ride from Derby to Skegness on Saturday 18^th May 2024. He raised over £12,000 for the Derbyshire Children’s Holiday Centre and Derby Kids’ Camp. To find out more about the charities, please click here.

Adrian Sunderland commented, “As many of you know, this is no real hardship because I love riding my bike anyway and it’s for a great cause. Derbyshire Children’s Holiday Centre and Derby Kids Camp provide some of the most disadvantaged and deserving children with opportunities and experiences they would otherwise be unable to access.”

To donate to this wonderful cause, please visit: https://www.justgiving.com/page/sunders-sea-and-skeg

How are channel companies approaching their environmental, social and corporate governance strategies?

We try to reduce our carbon footprint by preferring greener suppliers, promoting recycling, offering cycle-to-work schemes and using Teams. Apart from helping the planet, it saves money, and we have partners that need us to have green credentials. Social governance is a priority at Jola, as we provide competitive packages and an engaging culture for employees to thrive. Channel companies regularly support local and national causes running for charity, playing in football and boxing matches, hosting coffee mornings and supporting local food banks. It is a great way to engage employees, give back to the local community and encourage physical and mental well-being. Corporate governance around equal pay and diversity has been under the spotlight for the last few years in the channel and we display our diversity awards with pride.

How important are ESG strategies to purchasing decisions? 

As you would expect unique solutions, reliability, security and pricing all factor into decision-making, however, the larger corporates are asking partners for ESG policies more and more.

What support is available from vendors in the channel?

Sharing best practices is a good place to start as well as making policies available via web pages and partner portals.

One of our most important values is ‘customer first’. This is because our customers all have their own customers and when things go wrong, or their end user needs information, speed is vital.

For the first time, we are publishing some of our KPIs and whilst we think these numbers are world-class, we know we can always improve.

*Professional contact centres use this methodology to measure success. You may see organisations publish average response times and this is often either down to weak management or a deliberate attempt to hide poor performance.

To explain by example. Imagine a 9-5 contact centre receiving 100 calls an hour on average. From 9-12 and 2-5 the average response time is 10 seconds but over the lunch period, inadequate cover means the average is 300 seconds. The daily average wait time is less than a minute and a half but this masks the true overall customer experience. Furthermore, if managers believe in this flawed system, customer-affecting issues are harder to identify, diagnose and fix.

When advertising for new recruits, we use local apprenticeship specialists and target university students. We also advertise locally using a refer-a-friend scheme. LinkedIn and the website are a given, but we have more success targeting people we know, or local people looking for a chance to learn something new.

A lot of experienced candidates expect remote working and often ask how many days they need to be in the office. However, we have also found that many new recruits want to be in the office with experienced mentors to help them develop and succeed in their roles. We have found running our business with a mix of remote working and in-office hot desking very successful. It is important to monitor and measure the right key performance indicators so that employees know what they need to achieve. With this in place, ‘where’ the work is completed becomes less important.

We are at the forefront of technology, with a work-from-anywhere ethos and connected Robustels in our backpacks. We embrace new technologies and help our channel partners to benefit from technology sunsetting and switch-offs.

I am not sure all companies are prioritising diversity and inclusion in their recruitment strategies but we do. We have reviewed our end-to-end process to eliminate unconscious bias and remove barriers.

Promoting company culture can attract like-minded individuals who share the same goals. A competitive package, attractive bonus schemes and the chance to grow and develop with a company are equally attractive.

We can expect a huge amount of opportunity for the channel. Successful resellers are trusted by their customers, they are more than just suppliers they are advisors. For the SME business, they are perhaps faced with some uncertainty, such as what happens with my PSTN lines and the things connected to them.  The reseller that takes away the uncertainty is in the driving seat to help their customer benefit from the new connectivity as well as solve some of the more niche PSTN replacement problems that are being ignored by the large telcos.

Is the future of connectivity fixed-first, mobile-first, or something in between?

I think the future of connectivity is definitely something in between. There is no doubt that a business that is on-net with one of the fibre providers will want to take their primary connectivity that way.  For them, this connectivity will almost certainly be mission-critical. So, for fibre-connected customers, more and more we see a growing requirement for cellular (4G/5G) backup. Many of the fibre providers are including this as standard with their B2B offerings, providing seamless failover between fixed-line and mobile. 

Of course, not every business is on-net for fibre and so we’re seeing more and more sites where resellers are choosing a mobile broadband solution. According to Ofcom, 73% of homes could benefit from gigabit broadband at the end of last year compared to 82% that could get 5G.  I think that whilst both footprints will continue to grow, in all likelihood 5G will always be the technology used to fill the gaps or provide connectivity where the requirement is temporary (such as construction sites, festivals etc.) or mobile (such as public transport, marine etc.).

The average speed achieved by Three UK’s 5G customers was 275Mbit/s last quarter with the highest performance measured at 1.4Gbit/s!  So there isn’t necessarily a performance compromise to be made through the use of mobile vs. fixed like there was when 3G was the best service available.